Right alongside the Trinity demonstration, AMD also showed off its FX CPUs – with competing Intel CPUs by the side. Two AMD FX CPUs were shown benchmarked against two Intel Core CPUs, both times the FX CPUs coming out on top. However, neither victory was comprehensive.

The first benchmark pegged a AMD FX 8-core CPU against a similarly priced Intel Core i5 in Handbrake. While the exact models weren't revealed, it is likely a Core i5 2400/2500 and FX-8100/8120 were benchmarked. A 5 minute standard definition was converted at 223 fps on the FX system against 188fps for the Core i5. The conclusion is simple – AMD has a 19% performance/price lead in Handbrake. While Handbrake isn't as aggressively multi-threaded as Cinebench or X264, it does respond to multiple threads, giving AMD's 8-cores an advantage (albeint disproportionate) over Intel's 4-core, 4-thread Core i5.

The second benchmark involved Dirt 3 running at 2560×1600 with two Radeon HD 6970 cards in Crossfire. An unnamed FX CPU scored 82.8fps versus 80.9fps for the Intel Core i7 980X. At such resolutions, games are extremely CPU limited, and slight performance difference does not reveal much.

The benchmarks don't reveal as much as we would have liked, but there are signs of status quo – Intel leading on performance and IPC while AMD winning on performance/$ and especially multithreaded performance.